new camera battery

Fujitsu began selling in Japan on Tuesday a laptop that runs on wind power — well, almost. The company is purchasing wind power “green energy credits” for each of the “FMV Loox” laptops sold that are equivalent to the amount of electricity estimated to be used by the machine over a four year lifespan.

The move is a first in the Japanese market and seeks to tap into a growing eco-conciousness among Japanese consumers.

Fujitsu’s calculations are based on an assumption that the computer will be used for 4.5 hours each day, left on-charge for a further 4.5 hours and switched off for 15 hours for each of 240 days each year over four years. The resulting amount of electricity is 45.55 kilowatt hours and that’s equivalent to 18 kilograms of CO2 emissions.

So, for each machine sold Fujitsu will purchase the equivalent amount of wind-power credits from the Japan Natural Energy Co., which has been established by power generation companies to encourage such good deeds of corporate citizenship.

The result is a PC that in theory at least is powered by wind energy.

Of course none of this comes free. The green PC will cost ¥113,800 (US$1,160) compared to ¥76,800 for a similar PC that doesn’t include the green energy credits. That’s a premium of ¥37,000 for the green energy version.

In addition the computer complies with current EnergyStar standards and the new standards that come into effect in July.

The computer, which will be available through Fujitsu’s Web site and not through shops, is among the company’s smallest models and features a 5.6-inch screen that can swivel around and fold back on itself into a tablet PC-like form factor. While not positioned as a netbook it runs the Intel Atom processor that is common in most other machines of the same size. Other features include 1GB of memory, up to a 120GB hard disk drive and built-in cellular modem card in some models.

Launch details for markets outside of Japan were not anno

So I’m pretty excited about today’s post. Dan Nystedt says Apple doesn’t get netbooks. Probably true, but I think Apple should skip to cloudbooks. Last week I set myself up with a bad, bad new $200 MacBook Cloud. Sound too good to be true? It is indeed hard fact. More importantly, I’m going to share the secret sauce so you can get yourself one of these fabulous devices.

So what’s a cloudbook? A notebook optimized for using cloud services, of course.

[ Read Dan Nystedt's post on why Apple may miss out on the biggest device trend since the smartphone because, absent Steve Jobs, other execs don't seem to grasp future product trends ]

For me, this started when a buddy showed me his Hacintosh. He had picked up a used, non-Apple laptop for about $300 and installed Mac OS X on it. If you’re an Apple fan or a Darwin project participant, you’re well aware of this possibility. The Gizmodo guys upped the stakes in February when they hackintoshed a Dell Mini 9 into what they called “the Ultimate OS X Netbook.”
For the record, the instructions they posted absolutely rock, and it’s incredibly easy to create one of these yourself. I love my Gizmodo peeps, but may I be so bold as to suggest a small improvement: Why stop with a netbook when you could have a MacBook Cloud? I didn’t think it would be too hard to take this hack to the next level by taking advantage of some cloud services.

I grabbed a Dell Mini 9 off a friend and got to work. No rocket science involved. A couple of add-ons later, I had a sweet little machine that I’m happier with than any computer I’ve ever owned. I had a little jolt of inspiration when I saw my buddy’s Mini 9 running Mac OS X. Why not finally use that silly MobileMe cloud-synchronization account I bought from Apple? Seriously, I like being able to share contacts across my machines, but outside of that the service was damn near useless. My idea was to modify the OS to send only safe files to me.com (MobileMe’s address). I travel a lot and sometimes go to some pretty sketchy places, so I figured a cloudbook that cost me $200 and is incapable of saving personal data to its local hard drive would be the ultimate travel solution.

Think about that. You’re traveling with your new MacBook Cloud, which potentially cost less than your cell phone, and your machine is lost/stolen/missing/whatever. Are you worrying about the sensitive data you’re working on? Nope. Your data is still safe and accessible. Are you upset about the 200 bones? Probably, but that number pales in comparison to most business notebooks and isn’t even in the same ballpark with losing your secret plans for world domination. Are you worried about someone hacking your password? Not even. Just log into your me.com account and change the password. Ta-da! You’ve now taken a potentially disastrous experience and eliminated all the risk for $200. You wouldn’t even break a sweat if customs confiscated it on your way back into the country

Microsoft made headlines recently when The Wall Street Journal reported that the company planned to equip netbooks with the Starter edition of Windows 7, a semi-crippled version that only lets users run up to three applications at a time.

This is puzzling, considering that Microsoft really needs Windows 7 to be on the netbook. Netbooks are the one segment of the PC market that’s actually growing, even in the current economy. For now, Microsoft is offering Windows XP on netbooks because Vista simply won’t run on a netbook’s limited hardware, but it’s going to need to move them to Windows 7 once that operating system hits the market.

(It’s worth noting that while Microsoft claims any version of Windows 7 will run on current netbooks, Intel is not making such claims. In fact, Anand Chandrasekher, Intel’s head of Ultra Mobility, recently said that Intel will be releasing new Atom processors in the second half of 2009 that will support Windows 7 Starter and Basic editions.)

Which brings up the question: Is there anything wrong with running a full version of Windows 7 on a netbook? To test this out, I decided to install the Windows 7 Ultimate beta (because of frequent updates, I worked with builds 7000 to 7077) on a Dell Mini 9 netbook. How well would it run?

What Windows 7 needs

Microsoft states that Windows 7 requires a 1-GHz processor, 1GB of main memory and support for DirectX 9 graphics with 128MB of memory (for the Aero interface). The company recommends that you have at least 16GB of available disk space for the installation; Windows 7 actually takes up about 5GB.

The Dell Mini 9 is powered by an Intel Atom N270 processor running at 1.6 GHz. The test machine had 1GB of RAM and an 8GB SSD. The 8.9-in. display is powered by the processor’s built-in 945GSE graphics. The default resolution, which is typical for a netbook, is 1024 by 600. The Mini 9 also has three USB ports, an Ethernet port, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and an SD card reader.

What it doesn’t have, as is the case with almost all netbooks, is an optical drive for the installation disk. To get around this, I used a Sony DRX-710UL external DVD drive.

Smooth installation, slow performance

The installation, from start to finish, took about an hour and there wasn’t a single glitch. Once in place, Windows 7 was slow to boot up. Because of a netbook’s lowered graphics capacity, you can forget about running the Aero interface, but even Windows 7’s low-end non-Aero desktop took a while to load on the Mini 9.

To provide a comparison, I also loaded Windows 7 on an HP EliteBook 2530p, a 3-lb. ultralight notebook that comes with a 1.86-GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 2GB of RAM. I tested both machines using Microsoft’s Windows Experience Index, the performance benchmark that’s included in both Vista and Windows 7. On a scale running from 1.0 to 7.9, the Dell Mini 9 came in at a 2.0, while the EliteBook showed a 3.1 result. (In contrast, a high-end system with DX10 graphics is expected to score somewhere around 6.0 or higher.)

Performance wasn’t the only problem I came across. For example, I was unable to perform two network-related tasks at once. For example, if I copied a file from a network server or watched a YouTube video, life was fine. But if I tried to do both things at once, I ended up with a frozen system.